by Mark Russinovich
I’ll call this a techno-detective story as it has a dose of violence and mystery to complement its main cybercrime story. Somewhat similar to Arthur Clarke’s “Breakpoint” but more clearly tied to the here and now risks of a terrorist attack on current Internet based technologies. Russinovich is an expert on the internals of the Windows operating system and is now a senior technical person at Microsoft whereas Clarke is security policy expert. This is more realistic and is the better book of the two.
The plot is pretty straight forward and in the beginning seems like window dressing for some very readable information on internet crime and some techniques used to gain illicit access to computer systems. After a while, the story line does get going and becomes a light entertaining story. While there is a lot of accurate information related to computer malware in the book, it doesn’t get in the way of the story.
Russia and Russian criminals play a significant part in the story and this book paints a picture of Russia which is similar to the decay and corruption portrayed in Snowdrops which I recently read.